Word: canters
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There was nothing very special about the message that made Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel the most hated couple in cyberspace. It was a relatively straightforward advertisement offering the services of their husband-and-wife law firm to aliens interested in getting a green card -- proof of permanent-resident status in the U.S. The computer that sent the message was a perfectly ordinary one as well: an IBM-type PC parked in the spare bedroom of their ranch-style house in Scottsdale, Arizona. But on the Internet, even a single computer can wield enormous power, and last April this...
...commercial interests eager to make money on it, by veteran users who want to protect it, by governments that want to control it, by pornographers who want to exploit its freedoms, by parents and teachers who want to make it a safe and useful place for kids. The Canter-and-Siegel affair, say Net observers, was just the opening skirmish in the larger battle for the soul of the Internet...
...many Internet regulars, it was a provocation so bald-faced and deliberate that it could not be ignored. And all over the world, Internet users responded spontaneously by answering the Spammers with angry electronic- mail messages called "flames." Within minutes, the flames -- filled with unprintable epithets -- began pouring into Canter and Siegel's Internet mailbox, first by the dozen, then by the hundreds, then by the thousands. A user in Australia sent in 1,000 phony requests for information every day. A 16-year-old threatened to visit the couple's "crappy law firm" and "burn it to the ground...
...Canter and Siegel refused to give ground. They declared the experiment "a tremendous success," claiming to have generated $100,000 in new business. They threatened to sue Internet Direct for cutting them off from even more business (although the suit never materialized). And they gave an unrepentant interview to the New York Times. "We will definitely advertise on the Internet again," they promised...
...like a declaration of war, and as if on cue, the harassment surged anew. The lawyers' fax machine began spewing out page after page of blank paper. Hundreds of bogus magazine subscriptions began showing up on their doorstep. And technicians began devising tools that would prevent Canter and Siegel from making good their threat. The most ingenious: a piece of software written by a Norwegian programmer that came to be known as the "cancelbot" -- a sort of information-seeking robot that roams the Internet looking for Canter and Siegel mass mailings and deletes them before they spread...